Talk:Washington Irving

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Washington Irving. --Antiquary 19:43, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

• A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.

• A kind heart is a fountain of gladness making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.

• A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

• Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

• Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

• An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

• Here's to your good health, and your family's good health, and may you all live long and prosper.

• Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

• Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

• Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

• One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.

• Resolved — never to do anything which I should be afraid to do, if it were my last of life.

• Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.

• Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.

• The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes.

• The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection, and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.

• The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.

• The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.

• There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.

• There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
  • Probably not Washington Irving (nor Dr. -- Samuel? -- Johnson), though it is often attributed to one of these two. See the post "Find the Source of the Quotation…" on the Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine website. This post jibes with what I found on the Internet. --Hughh (talk) 20:39, 4 April 2017 (UTC)